page_title: History of electronic engineering
section_title: Transistors and integrated circuits
hierarchical_section_title: History of electronic engineering / Transistors and integrated circuits
caption_attribution_description: English: Mugshot
context_page_description: Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary defines electronics as "The science and technology of the conduction of electricity in a vacuum, a gas, or a semiconductor, and devices based thereon".
  Electronic engineering as a profession sprang from technological improvements in the telegraph industry during the late 19th century and in the radio and telephone industries during the early 20th century. People gravitated to radio, attracted by the technical fascination it inspired, first in receiving and then in transmitting. Many who went into broadcasting in the 1920s had become "amateurs" in the period before World War I. The modern discipline of electronic engineering was to a large extent born out of telephone-, radio-, and television-equipment development and the large amount of electronic-systems development during World War II of radar, sonar, communication systems, and advanced munitions and weapon systems. In the interwar years, the subject was known as radio engineering. The word electronics began to be used in the 1940s In the late 1950s the term electronic engineering started to emerge.
context_section_description: The first working transistor was a point-contact transistor invented by John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain at the Bell Telephone Laboratories (BTL) in 1947. William Shockley then invented the bipolar junction transistor at BTL in 1948. While early junction transistors were relatively bulky devices that were difficult to manufacture on a mass-production basis, they opened the door for more compact devices.
  The surface passivation process, which electrically stabilized silicon surfaces via thermal oxidation, was developed by Mohamed M. Atalla at BTL in 1957. This led to the development of the monolithic integrated circuit chip. The first integrated circuits were the hybrid integrated circuit invented by Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments in 1958 and the monolithic integrated circuit chip invented by Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1959.
  The MOSFET (metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor, or MOS transistor) was invented by Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng at BTL in 1959. It was the first truly compact transistor that could be miniaturised and mass-produced for a wide range of uses. It revolutionized the electronics industry, becoming the most widely used electronic device in the world. The MOSFET is the basic element in most modern electronic equipment, and has been central to the electronics revolution, the microelectronics revolution, and the Digital Revolution. The MOSFET has thus been credited as the birth of modern electronics, and possibly the most important invention in electronics.
  The MOSFET made it possible to build high-density integrated circuit chips. Atalla first proposed the concept of the MOS integrated circuit (MOS IC) chip in 1960, followed by Kahng in 1961. The earliest experimental MOS IC chip to be fabricated was built by Fred Heiman and Steven Hofstein at RCA Laboratories in 1962. MOS technology enabled Moore's law, the doubling of transistors on an IC chip every two years, predicted by Gordon Moore in 1965. Silicon-gate MOS technology was developed by Federico Faggin at Fairchild in 1968. Since then, the mass-production of silicon MOSFETs and MOS integrated circuit chips, along with continuous MOSFET scaling miniaturization at an exponential pace (as predicted by Moore's law), has led to revolutionary changes in technology, economy, culture and thinking.
caption: Dawon Kahng co-invented the MOSFET transistor (1959)
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